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Does anyone know how to convert Hex values or RGB values in Xara, to Pantone numbers?
I've never had to look at this before.
But, now, having designed a logo, I assume that I will need to provide Pantone colour numbers etc...
Any help and advice would be appreciated.
The best way to do this is to buy a Pantone swatch book and use the actual printed Pantone colors to make your choice. (See here for an explanation http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/color...ntonebooks.htm). Pantone spot colors are especially mixed ink formulas that can be used by any printer in the world to mix a specific color. And if you select a color from the swatch book or fan book that comes close to your screen color then you have a combination that will look the same on the web as in print.
Pantone swatch books are not cheap, however. But picking a color on the screen is very inaccurate.
Back up a second.
How will the client (whether it is yourself or another) going to have work printed? Offset or digitally (digital presses generally use CMYK), on locally connect printers--what type of local printers?
What are the color numbers? Can you provide just a drawing with boxes filled with the colors?
BTW, there are several charts on-line. One such is here:
http://www.labelpartners.com/pantone_coated_table.html
But take them with a grain of salt. I think you would find that some will actually produce the same (or similar/close enough) result as using AI, ID, or what not to check the conversion value/ink name. But more are off. Which is why a sample file of the color(s) used would be good.
This really is a case of, "I don't know what I don't know."
That's why I'm trying to get advice from you Xperts.
As requested, I have attached a pic, where you can see that I've tried to do work on this.
My question would be; are my Pantone colour numbers correct.
This is according to stuff I've been able to find on the Internet.
Thanks so far, Mike and Gary.
Any and all advice would be appreciated.
EDIT: Thanks a lot for that link Mike. That's the sort of thing I was trying to find.
Having attached a pic, I hope you can check for me if my work on the Pantone numbers is correct or not?
EDIT Again: Going by the link you gave in Post #4, I checked the Red and I can see that Pantone 1795 is not correct.
Sorry. I was actually requesting an Xara file. But no worries.
This is where a swatch book would pay off as Gary mentions. If you are going to use any design application--especially a non-color managed application like Xara products--a swatch book is a must. Not only for Pantone colors (or whatever solid color model) but also for CMYK values. Pantone books are spendy. There are good alternatives for the CMYK swatch books. In both cases, one ought to pick up color swatch books for both coated and uncoated paper.
And there are assumptions that need answered. For instance, you live in the UK. Assumptions like:
- Your customer also lives in the UK.
- This logo will end up printed in the UK.
- This logo will be output professionally and on local, non-color-managed printers (like consumer-level office printers).
Let's pick on #2. This means that likely the color profile used for print-ready art in the form of PDFs will be using a FOGRA profile. But which one? It does make a difference for the CMYK values--and RGB values when printed using consumer printers and web-use PDFs. Fun stuff, huh?
I didn't take the time to cross-reference the RGB/Hex values. I can, but the FOGRA or other output intent is really needed. As well, whether this is even going to be printed using Pantone colors anyway.
Here is a screen shot attached. The middle column is actually correct *if* your CMYK numbers are correct. I suspect they are not. The screen shot is from inside XDP--a non-color managed software.
Mike
Another question.
If I put in the Hex values into PhotoShop, then I get different RGB values.
So, is Xara's %, different to Photoshop RGB values?
e.g. # 2e2e2e
Xara gives: R: 18% G: 18% B: 18%
PhotoShop: R: 46 G: 46 B:46
And the CMYK values are different in PhotoShop as well.
EDIT: Thanks for the reply Mike. I need a Pantone Swatch and a CMYK Swatch.
OK. Is there one swatch that would do that or will I need to purchase two?
Change Xara to use 0-255 values instead of percentages.
Also, concerning xara's inability to display pantone colors accurately when the pantone is outside displayable rgb (what the monitor uses) values...some of the pantones used here cannot be accurately displayed in rgb. This is why that middle column looks wrong onscreen and in the resultant PDF. If Xara used LAB values it would display pretty accurately. One has to trust the output and check the PDF in acrobat.
BTW, setting the units to 0-255 mucks up using CMYK numbers for anyone following along in this thread.
Xara, among other things, needs to allow this setting per color model (aside from adding LAB as a color model and using it for Pantone use)...
For CMYK books (both coated and uncoated) I typically recommend (and I use) Tintbooks' CMYK books:Quote:
Originally Posted by Rik
http://www.tintbooks.com
For the Pantone colors, there are many, many to choose from because there are many, many Pantone color swatches available. They are spendy, go to Pantone's web site.
Pantone also sells a software, Pantone Color Manager. While you can look up Pantones by color number and it includes every Pantone swatch, one cannot look up by RGB, HEX nor CMYK. It can display those numbers, however. I have attached a screen shot for the middle column's red color.
Your red has CMYK values of 0, 95.7, 100, 0
The Pantone shown in the screen shot has values of 0, 96, 100, 0
Mike
Great link on the Pantone colors Mike.
Oh. Regarding the swatches themselves. If one designs with Pantones and if/when the CMYK (or RGB) values are needed for output, generally the PDF creation can be used for the conversion. However, I would use Acrobat for the conversion as it uses LAB values for the conversion (I think). But choosing a profile in Xara that will not use Pantone and force the conversion can be used. But I would still check in Acrobat to be sure of the conversion.
Mike
Thanks very much for perceiveiring with this. Mike.
Can you tell me which CMYK values I should use?
Xara's or PhotoShop's?
I can use the same hex number and both products give me different CMYK values.
If you switch the Units in the Options dialog to 0-255, at least the RGB works correctly:Quote:
Originally Posted by Rik
Attachment 99130
Xara will give the exact same number as PS does:
Attachment 99131
Without needing to start PS, what are the CMYK values it gives for the 2e2e2e hex number?
# 2e2e2eQuote:
Originally Posted by mwenz
PhotoShop gives: C: 70 M: 64 Y: 63 K: 63
I can't get anything like those numbers in Xara. Whether you've got 'Percent' or '0-255' selected.
I am leaving in a couple minutes for a few days. I'll be taking the laptop and will take a look tonight when I get to where I am going...
Something else puzzles me, Mike.
The site you posted shows various colours.
I've captured a small portion, because I'm trying to find a Red in amongst all the colours.
So, if you look at the pic attached, a lot of those colours should not have the names that have been given.
How can they call that colour, Red?
Hi Rik, why pantone, why not just use CMYK as Mike asked in post #3. It would save a lot of mucking about. The only real time that I would use Pantone colours is to save money on the set up cost for printing when I only need to use a few colours and the numbers of runs are large. If it is just for the colour matching as your unsure what your CMYK output is going to look like from Xara well that's fine go ahead and use Pantone. If you have access to a desktop laser printer try a print from that as it will give you a fair idea straight from Xara what your output will look like.
All printers that I have used in the UK have stated somewhere between 5000 to 6000 A4 size copies makes it worth while cost of using negatives for printing wither it is 3 or 4 colours used and to be honest most will go ahead and use 4 negs. because it saves time mixing a Pantone colour. If the number of copies are below this number then it will be a straight digital print just like your desktop laser but with better quality of output.
Rik,Quote:
My question would be; are my Pantone colour numbers correct.
Apology in advance for any of the following which you may already know. This is a public forum, so it's assumed there are others reading, too.
Digital graphic designers (especially beginners in commercial print) commonly sweat blood over this due to some fundamental misconceptions:
Spot color:
The term "spot color" refers to specific physical substance (ink, paint, dye, or whatever) that is physically loaded into a printing press or some other repro mechanism. The color of the output, therefore, is simply a function of whatever ink is loaded into the press.
In offset printing, a spot color defined in the graphic program file is simply a command to print objects associated with that color to its own sheet (separation) as a grayscale image. There's no actual color mixing involved whatsoever. An ink of the specified spot color is simply loaded into the press. When you choose RGB, Lab, CMYK, Hexidecimal, HSB or whatever values for a spot color in graphics software, all you are doing is specifying how the separation named as the spot color will be represented on the screen (or when exported as a raster image or when changed to a process color, in which cases you're no longer dealing with spot color anyway).
For example, suppose you specify Pantone 185 (a red). You can simply define a spot color in the design software, name it "Pantone 185". You don't even have to select it from a "Pantone Library" provided with the software. You only need to define the color as a spot color. You can then set it to display any way you want on screen by "defining" its color. For example, suppose you set it to 50%Cyan 100% Yellow, a green. Doing that won't make one whit of difference in how it prints because, again, how it prints is simply a matter of the pressman physically loading the actual red-colored Pantone 185 ink into the press.
Process color:
Process color is a scheme for using a very small set of translucent physical pigments as "primary colors" which are "mixed" (actually, not mixed but printed on top of each other) in order to simulate the colors of more pigments, much like you learned in preschool to mix other colors from red, yellow, and blue crayons. This is very very far from perfect in standardized process inks, much as it is in crayons. Countless pigments exist in the physical world which simply cannot be accurately matched by using process color. (That's what people are talking about when they trot out the "gamut" buzzword.) That's one of the reasons why spot color inks exist in the first place. (It's not just a matter of reducing printing costs--in fact, spot colors are commonly used in combination with process color, thereby significantly and deliberately increasing the cost of a print job.)
To make matters worse, "color matching" is about more than just "color." For example, spot colors (being physical pigments) differ in opacity, whereas CMYK process inks are translucent in order to facilitate their "mixing." Then there are whole other matters of, for example, reflectivity and luminance. You can't accurately match a metalic or a flourescent spot color ink with CMYK even if your life depends upon it. Pantone can't even do that with its own metallic and flourescent inks.
And we're still not done. The exact color of the "whiteness" of the particular paper you print on significantly affects the appearance of offset inks (both spot and process), depending on the opacity of the inks involved.
And then there's the practical side of things. Pantone Libraries in mainstream software laughably specify CMYK "equivalents" in terms of hundredths of a percent. Really? I dare say there's not an offset press in the world that reliably and consistently holds ink coverage within a whole percentage variance; and the vast majority of real-world pressrooms probably vary several percentages.
Color models:
CMYK is a direct reference to the size of dots of four specific colors of actual ink. RGB, HSL, and even Lab are numerical values, but they are not direct references to pigments at all. HSL and Lab are color models; methods of representing perceived colors as a set of three values corresponding to "3 dimensional" axes of a conceptual "color space." RGB are just values to send to a CRT monitor's cathode gun or a flat panel monitor's LCDs, or to a printer's driver software. No one can control how much variance exists between all such devices (and many more) or how much individual devices change over time. That's where all the current hoopla and tedious gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over so-called color management (actually, device calibration) comes from.
Just because different kinds of measurements are numerically modeled doesn't necessarily mean they can be accurately converted between each other.
Converting RGB to CMYK is not a simple, unambiguous, mathematical 1:1 conversion like RGB to hexidecimal, which is just expressing the same set of three numbers in base 16 rather than base 10). There are up to four numbers in CMYK, whereas there are only three in RGB. So consider: How do you consistently "convert" three numbers into four? 2 x 2 x 5=20. So does 1x2x2x5. So does 2x2x2x2.5. So does 2 x 3 x 3 x 1.66....
In this sense, "converting" RGB to CMYK is an attempt to convert two entirely different things. Forget apples and oranges; how many apples equal one sheep?
Moreover, where do you see RGB? On a monitor. Where do you see CMYK? On a printed page. And what do you see them with? Human eyes. Monitors glow. Paper doesn't. Human vision (including color perception, contrast, detail) is constantly self-adjusting.
So the above sermon is just to make this point germane to your question: There is no single, precise, "conversion" of a so-called "Pantone color" to a CMYK mix, just as there is no single, precise "conversion" of an RGB value to a set of CMYK percentages. The spot-to-process values specified by Pantone--no matter how exactingly they were derived--are still mere recommendations, not actual colorimetric equivalents. And you are at liberty to make your best judgement regarding how "well" Pantone's (or anyone else's) recommendations serve as CMYK approximations. For example, Pantone's Spot-to-Process recommendation for Pantone 185 can specify 76.47% Y 'till the cows come home. But if I specify Pantone 185 as a client's spot color for his identity graphic when rendered in spot color, I'm still probably going to specifiy 100%Y in my process substitute in the client's style guide, if only for practical reasons.
And that's why you still buy printed Pantone swatch books, sign paint chip books, embroidery samples, vinyl samples, etc., etc., and make your own judgements. Don't strain at a gnat to swallow an elephant.
JET
Albacore: I have already said that I've never had to do this before.
Up to this point, all I've ever done is to design something on the screen. Then display it on the screen. Quite often through a projector as well.
From time to time, I've printed out some sheets on a home printer.
But, now I need to get things printed from a printer shop.
Some advice I've had is that I will need to supply Pantone Colours and/or CMYK values.
Hence asking advice from the Xperts on TG.
OK. It seems that I need to buy some swatches. Then is it a case of trying to see which colour closely matches what I'm looking at on my screen?
I just thought that there might a conversion, of one type to another?! To be able to give exact colour names/numbers. And not what the eye may be able to match or not.
Maybe not.
Jet: I am extremely grateful for you very detailed explanation. I think I will have to read it quite a few times. Many thanks indeed.
Yes there is and yes Pantone might be the way to do it or maybe not. Why not just print it out and see, it's just colour, it's the method that you choose is different. Print not hard thing to do, you design, you print, you look. Easy, but things get in the road. Xara is the first, you look in RGB but you print in CMYK/Pantone and they don't match. So what do you do, well print it seems the natural thing to do. Well what type of printer and how many am I printing? Well I could do it myself but I have got to have a CMYK printer. Well that's easy I just spend over £100 and I have a CMYK printer which I can modify any Xara doc. colour to suit and the price of 1 full printed sheet might cost up to 35 pence. Well all of that seems easy, "I am not trying to be rude here! it is old fashion advice" all I have to do is get a hold of a print to see what it looks like, easy. Then we have to decide who is going to print it. Me on a desktop laser---- local digital printer------ printshop which uses negs or film where I have to pay for the set up plus the printing. I know what my clients want so it's my choice! 85% of the time it is going to be the local digital print shop which is cheap and here their easy to talk to because there local, terrific, let's get going! Honestly folk worry themselves too much about printing, it's just a process, it's just hoops that you have got to jump through. Maybe I have been lucky I have had only one bad experience with a printshop and that was just a boring old fart, that thought he was better than most and had more knowledge than most. Well "f_ck him" and I moved on.
Look Rik, plunge in, it's not hard, after the first 40 (joke, joke......) go for it. Don't read too much, just put your practical hat on, just think about the to colour process, RGB and CMYK, use Acro Reader or better still buy yourself and old copy Acro Pro, use it, as it is bar far the best tool. Only buy it if you think you might do this again if not just use the Reader it's OK. But get a wet copy of your design it's only going to cost you £1 at the most, look at it and make your changes, simple!
When designing for print, don't think so much in terms of "color." Think in terms of inks. Printing is a very physical/mechanical real-world endeavor, and much of it boils down to practical common sense.Quote:
Up to this point, all I've ever done is to design something on the screen....But, now I need to get things printed from a printer shop. Some advice I've had is that I will need to supply Pantone Colours and/or CMYK values.
One of the first things you need to consider when designing for print is how many inks will be used to print the job. You should make that decision up-front.
First, Pantone is just a company. It's a company which began in the printing industry long ago (long before graphics computers), and which developed a scheme for mixing a set of its own specifically-colored inks (spot colors) from a smaller set of actual ink pigments. It publishes its formulae for mixing the smaller set of "base" inks in order to achieve the larger set of mixed inks with reasonable consistency. Then, for use as selection references, it published printed swatch books which were actually printed using those inks. It's all proprietary. Yes, it's widely used, but it's not some kind of universal scientific colorimetrc rule of nature.
The original concept was simple: Assuming print shops A and B both buy their inks, X and Y, from Pantone, and assuming they use the same published proportions to mix up a third ink, Z, then the results from print shop A and print shop B should be the same color, even though they are different print jobs, run on different presses for different customers in different locations.
But that all assumes spot color; a term which means you're going to load the actual desired color of ink (Z) into the press.
So basically, you only need to worry about "Pantone" if you are actually going to print using spot color inks; in other words, you are going to actually load the press with the color(s) of ink you want to be the end result. Think of the ubiqutous US politician's calling cards and signs. They're almost always red, white, and blue. The paper is white, so you can print the job by loading a red spot color ink and a blue spot color ink into a press which has only two print heads. Use the same brand and color of inks, and you can print half of the cards in California and the other half in Georgia and they will be (within reason) the same color.
But that's only practical for up to a few inks. A printing press only has a few inkwells into which to load ink. You can't load an infinite number of different-colored inks into a press in order to print, say, an ordinary full-color photograph of the same politician's toothy grin. That's where process color comes in.
You resort to printing with a set of four "primary colors" of inks in such a way that when overprinting each other, they visually blend together to simulate a broad range of colors which can reasonably represent all the colors in the photo. If you're project is going to be printed using this "four color process," you don't really need to concern yourself with "Pantone" at all.
So later, predictably, the desire arose for being able to reasonably simulate a particular Pantone spot color ink when printing using four color process. So Pantone began publishing its "official" recommendations for CMYK mixes which approximate the colors of its spot color inks. Again, all this predates computers. When graphics computers became commonplace, Pantone began publishing software versions of its ink color references. And since then, many digital designers insist on using Pantone swatches as their primary reference, even when designing for media (signage, for one example) which don't even have colors corresponding to Pantone's.
If designing for four color process, there's nothing that says you have to refer to Pantone's proprietary colors at all. If you want "red" well, you just can't get any more "red" in CMYK than 100% Magenta, 100% Yellow. But I guarantee you that will fall far short of the intense "redness" of the Mustang I had occasion to rent on a particular trip to San Diego.
Does that mean it's impossible to print a suitable photo of that Mustang? Nope. That's where color correction comes into play as opposed to mere color calibration. Color correction throws the spectrophotometer out the window, takes into account the undeniable and unavoidable limitations of CMYK four color process, and intelligently exploits the perceptual and contextual adaptiveness of human vision to make a CMYK print more convincingly suggest the brilliance of that Mustang. And that's where continous study, observation, and experience comes into play.
Maybe. Maybe not. (At least, maybe not right this minute.) Again, it depends on what exactly you're needing to print, and despite the length of this thread you really haven't yet shared one bit of information about that.Quote:
OK. It seems that I need to buy some swatches.
Not all printing is as all-fired color-critical as a national ad campaign or sales brochure for a very red Ford Mustang. In fact, truth be told, most isn't. And color-calibration, while not the highest ideal panacea which many of its devotees mistake it to be, is also not completely valueless. Device manufacturers and software publishers have gone to great calibration lengths for decades to at least keep you in the colorimetric ballpark by default.
Most projects for which beginners in print are likely to be hired are probably not in the realm of table-top glitzo color-critical. If the project you're working on is, for example, being commissioned by National Geographic, you should say so now. Otherwise, while getting your feet wet in ink-on-paper, you will probably come out just fine even committing the "unspeakable travesty" of sending an RGB PDF for automatic in-RIP converstion to CMYK for offset print.
But if you do that, just don't come on to the printing house like a super-sensitive artistic savant complaining about the lack of "brilliance" or "punch" or "good humor" or any other atsy-tartsy ill-defined term. Trust the printing professionals to take care of you. Seek opportunities to visit (or even work in) the press room. Read, study, gain experience.
And yes, when you can, buy a Pantone swatch book. You'll probably need several. And while you're at it, a PostScript process swatch book.
And don't be afraid to do some methodical experimentation of your own. For example, when you print the next process color project, place a few squares of incremented CMYK values in the waste area of the press sheet to test what you consider "the best" match for a particular spot color ink that will be used in the next upcoming project.
That kind of thing can accellerate your learning. It's not difficult (especially in digital print-on-demand environments) to justify printing a sheet or two of your own color swatches just to zero in on the best process specs for a particular customer's spot-colors.
Never trust what you see on your screen. Yes, go to reasonable lengths to have a reasonably well calibrated screen. But always take what your screen shows with a health grain of salt. Don't believe me? For just one kind of consideration, do the following:Quote:
Then is it a case of trying to see which colour closely matches what I'm looking at on my screen?
Turn off your monitor. Do it now.
What color is it? About 80% gray?
Now I ask you: Even with all the color-calibration you can muster, what's the darkest black your monitor can display?
See what I mean?
So sure, you want your monitor to look reasonably like print; not bluish, not yellowish. You want your several graphics apps to display colors with reasonable similarity. But when it all comes down to it, if you're ever going to be serious about this stuff you have to learn to fly by the numbers, not just the appearance of your monitor.
Example: An enterprising young illustrator sits in his mood-enhancing darkend room and does absolutely killer graphics which he hopes to someday see published in the game industry. He sends one of his stunning works to have a one-off poster printed for his portfolio. And when it comes back, it is utterly flat and featureless in the all-important shadow areas. That's just one kind of the ugly surprises in store for you if you don't seek to understand print-centric CMYK values.
As you've seen already in this thread, "conversions" abound....Quote:
I just thought that there might a conversion, of one type to another?!
...but the operative word here--and the falacy--is "exact." Not when substituting RGB for CMYK. And even when you achieve it (as many claim by using Lab as the intermediary color space) hair-splitting colorimetric calibration is not really the most important consideration for good color.Quote:
To be able to give exact colour names/numbers.
You've got to develop a "mind's eye" for actual ink-on-paper, not just for glowing backlit LCDs.Quote:
And not what the eye may be able to match or not.
JET
I wish I could really express my thanks for the time you're taking to explain things.Quote:
Originally Posted by JET
And I have shared information... In Post #5.
The hex colours you can reproduce in Xara.
As for the CMYK values in that post, I've already mentioned that they do not seem to match PhotoShop values. I have asked which I should trust?
Never having had to do this, I am trying to find out what I may need to know.
OK. I will need to find out what material it's going to be printed on.
Rik,
You've said you've designed a logo, you've shown four RGB colors, and said you need four matching Pantone colors.
But you haven't shown the logo or the document (brochure, ad, trade show poster, ...) that you need to include it in, or stated the printing environment (traditonal sheet-fed offset, digital composite, one-off large format printer, screen printing, flexography...).
This is why I'm saying you haven't really provided enough information about what you're doing. Here's the thought process:
Knowing only that we're talking about a "logo" the first question is, why would you want to require four spot color inks? That's not very practical. Surely you don't intend to require your customer to pay for a four spot-color press setup every time he needs to print his logo?
Usually, a proper logo should be unique, recognizable, elegant and as repro-versatile as it can practically be. It should not require four inks. If it requires four colors for its uniqueness or recognition, the designer should ask himself if he is using color as a crutch for an otherwise weak design.
A logo is the business's signature; its visual cornerstone; its identity mark. It has to be used everywhere, from extreme reductions to extreme enlargements in all kinds of media. What is the customer supposed to do when the logo needs to be printed in a single-color or two-color newspaper ad or on an invoice? Will it work for engraving on a ball point pen or an award plaque? Or embroidered on a golf shirt?
Confining the discussion to just print, if you're going to require four colors in a logo, and if those colors are ordinary colors like the red, green, cyan, and gray you've shown, why would you not simply print it with four process inks instead of requiring four spot inks? You're going to be hard pressed to find a printing house which dedicates a four-head press to custom combinations of four spot inks.
Suppose the customer needs a full-color brochure. If there's a compelling reason to require one spot color, or even two, six-head sheetfed presses are not uncommon which can accommodate that. But I don't see anything among the four RGB colors you've shown that suggest anything compelling like that.
Maybe, for example, there's something special about the cyan you've indicated. Cyan is notoriously the "weakest link" of CMYK. But you haven't shown the artwork, so that's just a guess.
So for the moment I have to just forget spot color. I don't see any reason for it in the colors you've indicated. So let's talk CMYK. You've got four RGB colors: red, green, a slightly lightish cyan, and a very dark gray.
There are both repro-practical and aesthetic reasons to use solids (100%) in identity graphics. First, it makes it possible to render the graphic as line art (avoiding the need for halftoning in repro methods like screen printing, or in small reductions where dots work against sharpness). Second, remember: When you look at your monitor, all you see are "solids." Your monitor doesn't render halftone dots even in regions where they will be requred for four color process printing. Screened inks just don't have the strength of solids. The very fact that they are screens of dots on a white paper "washes them out."
So are there any compelling reasons among the particular colors you've indicated to accept the disadvantages of tint screens in order to achieve a closer match? I really don't see any. Let's look at them one at a time:
The red is just a very slightly orangish red. In CMYK, the only way you get that is to make Y stronger than the M; so you have to tint the M. But how much? Is a "dead ringer" really worth making the red a bit more drab just to make it lean so very slightly toward orange? No? Okay. Just make it 100M, 100K.
The green-apple green will similarly have two CMYK components, this time Cyan and yellow. Just as in the case of orange, a solid Y will give it more brilliance than a tinted Y. The green you've chosen will require the C to be tinted to come reasonably close. Probably about 80% C. So this again raises the question of how important that particular green really is in the particular artwork which hasn't been shown? Will the design really suffer if it goes darker in order to print the C component as a solid? How much of the design uses that green? Which of the other colors does it directly contact?
The slightly light cyan is simple. C being the poorest component of CMYK, in order to stay "clean" it has to stay just C. Add any of the other components, and it either quickly shifts green/aqua (in the case of adding Y), or it goes muddy ( in the case of adding M). You've tried to specify a clean, bright "sky blue"--exactly the color which CMYK is very poor at producing. Again; your monitor glows. Process ink on paper doesn't; and cyan "glows" the least of the three. So if this color plays a particularly important role in the graphic, this is the only one for which I might see justification for a spot color. Failing that, you have two choices: either let it wash out to try to simulate the lightness of the RGB, or maintain what little intensity C offers by printing it solid, and therefore just slightly darker.
That leaves the gray. That's a very dark gray. Why? Do you want it to read as gray, or do you want it to read as a weak black, as if the ink wasn't printed well? There's a principle of design that says to make your design intentions look intentional, so they don't look like mistakes. Either make that gray lighter so it clearly reads as intentionally gray, or let it go solid black and thereby heighten the perceived brilliance of the other three colors by contrast. If it must be gray, not black, then it will have to involve tints anyway, unless you can live with the particular gray which solids of C, M, and Y yield. In that case, you can still maintain line art throughout and save yourself an ink, to boot.
Finally, how do the colors interact? Are any of them going to contact each other in the design? If so, which ones. Why? Because if they do, you're going to need to consider trapping. This will likely be less problematic if, for example, the cyan abuts the green than if it abuts the red, since the green and the cyan already share a significant component, C.
So you see how this works? Especially in the case of things like logo design, it's not a simple matter of drawing something that you decide "looks good" and then sweating blood to try to precisely replicate all of the RGB colors you happened to use in it with CMYK inks. Rather, it's a process of working out the practicalities of reproduction in concert with the design decisions toward a robustly successful solution. Hair-splitting RGB-to-CMYK colorimetrics-to-two-decimal-places is seldom the top priority.
JET
Jet that really good interaction with Rik good information provided from both a design perspective and printers viewpoint but I still think he is not believing you. He is more worried about the process and the fact that Xara values don't match PS's that's why I was chasing him just to get it printed. Goodness me the satisfaction I got to see my first work going through a press was a big high for me but that was after much altering of colours looking at wet copies from a laser. It was a printer that gave me your info on clean colours and stay clear of the over use of transparencies. Think also the newer print machines and better software at printers allow designs and colour usage to be more refined.
Rik something I have learned from following this post is your question about PhotoShop and Xara numbers not matching is the CMYK numbers are in percents in PhotoShop and if you use percents in Xara they will almost match perfectly. The RGB colors must be 0 -255 and the CMYK must be in percent on the options for them to match.
I was shocked after reading this and I did a simple test and exported 3 colors to a PDF. In both Adobe and Xara color #2a2a2a when reopened into either program reads Black. Hope the file was saved right and I am not adding confusion from my test.
Well, if you get a swatch book, also get a female to look at it, why? See here ;o)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...rent-ways.html
In my experience, if you're doing graphics work with a big company (as your customer) that has been around for a couple decades or so - picking the right Pantone colors matter. However, I've only ever worked for medium to small companies, and almost never doing work intended for printing to web-press, usually dealing with digital print work. So in 30+ years of working with the graphics industry, I've not had a single requirement to use Pantone colors ever - and that's after 20 years running my own shop, and 10 years before that at 3 different printing companies (one of them was a major web press company, now owned by R.R. Donnelly).
I know there is work and customers that require Pantone specifics in their designed graphics, it's just I've never encountered it. I do possess, a couple Pantone color selection swatch books, even though I've never used them.